Voiced labiodental fricative

The voiced labiodental fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨v⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is v.

Voiced labiodental fricative
v
IPA Number	129
Audio sample
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Encoding
Entity (decimal)	v
Unicode (hex)	U+0076
X-SAMPA	v
Braille

The sound is similar to voiced alveolar fricative /z/ in that it is familiar to most European speakers^{[citation needed]} but is a fairly uncommon sound cross-linguistically, occurring in approximately 21.1% of languages.^[1] Moreover, most languages that have /z/ also have /v/ and similarly to /z/, the overwhelming majority of languages with [v] are languages of Europe, Africa, or Western Asia, although the similar labiodental approximant /ʋ/ is also common in India. The presence of [v] and absence of [w], is a very distinctive areal feature of European languages and those of adjacent areas of Siberia and Central Asia.^{[citation needed]} Speakers of East Asian languages that lack this sound may pronounce it as [b] (Korean and Japanese), or [f]/[w] (Cantonese and Mandarin), and thus be unable to distinguish between a number of English minimal pairs.^{[citation needed]}

In certain languages, such as Danish,^[2] Faroese,^[3] Icelandic or Norwegian^[4] the voiced labiodental fricative is in a free variation with the labiodental approximant.